Track-by-Track: Lowest of the Low Look Over ‘Over Years And Overnight’

To say the least, it has been a creatively productive past five or six years for Lowest of the Low. The longtime staple of the Canadian rock scene has just released their brand new album Over Years and Overnight via Sonic Envy. It is the follow-up to 2023’s Welcome to the Plunderdome. Now back with their seventh studio album, it was one of the most collaborative efforts of their career. Three of the album’s eleven songs were co-written by all members of the band, which they had not done before. It’s an impressive sign that even well over 30 years since their formation, they are still finding new ways to keep the band fresh and challenge themselves.

In terms of the album, Over Years and Overnight is what you might expect from a band at this stage of their career. The songs reflect on the passage of time, the evolution of ideas, and the power of connection. It also explores themes of lost innocence, political disillusionment, and enduring hope. The album title is borrowed from the novel Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. It alludes to the nature of success and how it can feel like it comes so quickly, yet so slowly. It’s reflective of Lowest of the Low’s own journey and how it all started to happen for them at one point. But what can’t be overlooked is the years of hard work that led to that point.

We are fortunate to have frontman Ron Hawkins join us for an exclusive Track-by-Track rundown of the new record.

1. “Give Me My Heart Back”

“During a little lull in our usually busy schedule (we’d just released an album and it was January, so we had no gigs to prepare for), we decided to spend our weekly Monday rehearsal night just ‘fuckin’ around.’ With the intention of covering the Robert Gordon version of Marshall Crenshaw’s ‘Someday Someway’ we launched into it. A few minutes later, Michael (McKenzie), our guitar player, said ‘Hey, how come we don’t have a song with this beat? It’s cool.’

“Later, during a washroom break, David (Alexander) started playing a similar beat, and I played the chords to the song in reverse order. It sounded like something, so I started singing gibberish over it and blurted out ‘Give me my heart back.’ Everyone looked up, and it was clear we had something. It was sort of our version of stealing diamonds from a jewellery store, but walking backwards out of the place so they think you’re just coming in.”

2. “Wake Up And Smell The Rose”

“This was just a mash-up of ‘wake up and smell the coffee,’ a nicer way to say ‘give your head a shake,’ and ‘stop and smell the roses,’ a phrase that implores someone to take time to appreciate the beauty all around us. After a few years of being bludgeoned by heinous political theories and worldwide pandemics, it felt like a good time to remind myself that there were small, quiet moments of beauty all around me and to make sure I invested them with as much attention as the big, ugly moments. It feels fitting as well that my partner, Jill Riley, lent her beautiful counterpoint vocals to the outro of the song.”

3. “The Moon And The Stars And The Sky And The Sea”

“A straight-up love song about the elemental power of love. It’s a force of nature.”

Lowest of the Low ‘Over Years And Overnight’ album artwork

4. “Over Years And Overnight”

“I was reading Charles Yu’s book Interior Chinatown and came across the phrase ‘over years and overnight,’ as in ‘how did the Roman Empire fall? Over years and overnight.’ I started applying it to things in my own life, and it seemed to be a perfect metaphor for the elasticity of time. Anyone who’s ever had a kid experiences the surreal feeling of disorientation when they look at a teenager and remember a little curly-haired girl. It seems like the journey was a thousand years, and at the same time, it seems like yesterday. I can remember that feeling when Lowest of the Low started to take off and become a force in the local Toronto music scene. It seemed to somehow happen over years… but also overnight.”

5. “In The City Lights”

“Around the turn of the millennium, Toronto suffered a blackout that lasted for a couple of days. It was during a heat wave, and there was a strange and beautiful vibe in the air. There was a kind of trepidation because no one knew how long it might last, but people gathered around candles on porches and patios, and things slowed down and got more intimate, if only for a while. It was a window into a kind of sensual, slow existence that we vaguely remembered from pre-Internet days.

“And it levelled the playing field in a way. Every person in the community seemed to be represented as the creature comforts were taken out of the equation. I kept this in the back of my head as I was trying to write a kind of sultry, urban jam, like if Lou Reed was from Parkdale (a neighbourhood in Toronto).”

6. “The Seven Sorrows”

“Every now and again, I’m struck by the sadness of the world. Not the obvious stuff, the political horror, or the inhumanity of it all, but the sweet sadness of just being alive. The beautiful, noble struggle of just getting through the day. Being in the rock star business, I have lost a few friends along the way to ‘rock n’ roll misadventure.’ I also have many loved ones who are chained to the world and carry it with great difficulty. This song is for them. ‘Life’s a mystery… a little sadness, a little history.’”

7. “Say You Won’t Go”

“Not too long ago, a friend of mine lost his partner to cancer, and our whole community got a glimpse of what it means to be torn in two. Though we closed ranks around him and propped each other up as best we could, the loss was a seismic tremor for everyone. I wrote this for him, his partner and our whole group of friends. I could barely get through the process of demoing the song, let alone singing it live. Sometimes it hits home to me how healing art can be, not just for the people who experience it but for the people who create it as well.”

8. “The Only One I See”

“Another love song with a simple theme, out of the billions of souls walking the earth, you are the only one I see. For some reason, I got it I my head that bees were an apt metaphor as well. Worker bees, puttering away at busy work. All of us going about our business, our ‘to-do lists’ and our swamped schedules of pointless striving, when a lot of the time, everything we need is right there under our noses. The second verse is about this useless striving, for riches, for fame, for power. The song has one point to make: ‘love is forever… and I’m alright with that.’”

9. “How Do You Do?”

“This is an example of a song being built on one trick. I repeat ‘How do you do?’ over each chorus, and then as it hangs on to the very end of the line, I add an ‘it,’ completing the sentence ‘How do you do it?’ I stumbled across this by accident and thought it was cool, so then it was just a matter of reverse engineering the lyrics to get to that destination. The other conceit in the song is playing with dichotomy. Just a fun word game of opposites.”

10. “Rage On”

“When I was a little kid, my grandma had a cottage and I would leave by myself in a tiny boat in the morning and not come back until late afternoon. In the meantime, I would explore the lake, dock the boat on a wooded point and explore the forest looking for stones and cool branches and little animals. It was magical but also felt very right in a ‘no big deal’ kind of way.

“Later, as we grow up, there are so many instances when that is dissuaded and drummed out of us. ‘They took your dream of wild woods… they stripped that Buddhist childhood from your bones.’ If we’re not careful, we can be hollowed out and forget that spark that animated us as children – ‘they wanna buy and sell you. They try to heaven or hell you, but that song… It’s dead and gone.’

“The one driving point of the song is to rage on. No matter what we’re told or faced with, this is the one life we get, and we should do our best to rage on until it’s done.”

11. “DOTGOTW”

“We chose to use the acronym instead of spelling out ‘Dancing On The Grave Of The World.’ We’ve all suffered a terrible shock over the last bunch of years. From a once-in-a-century global pandemic, to runaway climate disaster and the rise of a new global fascist threat, it’s been a bit much to say the least.

“I was having a coffee a year or so ago with an old friend of mine. The two of us got politicized together in high school and started a straight-edge Marxist punk band. And after a lifetime of activism and political commitment, I asked him how he was doing. He told me he was feeling a little powerless and overwhelmed and that he just wanted his friends and family to be safe and happy. I understood that sentiment deep in my bones and smiled at him and said, ‘I guess we’re just dancing on the grave of the world?’ It stuck with me, and I went home and wrote the song.”